Two papers on this subject that I did a ways back are:
1. Environmental Implications of Growing Corn for Alcohol Production.
In "Agriculture as a Producer and Consumer of Energy" (W. Lockeretz,
ed.), Westview Press (1982).
2. Crop Residues for Energy: Comparative Costs and Benefits for the
Farmer, the Energy Facility, and the Public. Energy in Agriculture
1:71-89 (1981). [Note: The "costs" in this paper are not simply cash
costs: they include soil erosion, loss of soil organic matter and
nutrients, and off-farm effects. The crop used as an example was corn.]
Obviously, given how old these papers are, I can't swear that they still hold
up (nor that they held up the day they were published). Not having been
active in the field since the early 1980s, I don't know the more up-to-date
literature.
William Lockeretz
Tufts University